"I see it as a changing of an energy, the changing of a guard, the changing of universal consciousness," said Serg Miejylo, a 29-year-old gardener originally from Connecticut. Wearing sandals, smoking a rolled-up cigarette and sporting blonde dreadlocks, Miejylo is among those joining the festivities at Maya sites in southern Mexico and parts of Central America.

But while people here were celebrating, the close of the 13th bak'tun - a period of some 400 years - in the 5,125- ear-old Long Calendar of the Maya has raised fears among groups around the world that the end is nigh.

A U.S. scholar once said it could be seen as a kind of "Armageddon" by the illustrious Mesoamerican culture, and over time the idea snowballed into a belief that the Maya calendar had predicted the earth's destruction.

Fears of mass suicides, meteorites, huge power cuts, natural disasters, epidemics or an asteroid hurtling toward Earth have circulated on the Internet ahead of Dec. 21.

Chinese police have arrested about 1,000 people this week for spreading rumors about Dec. 21, and authorities in Argentina restricted access to a mountain popular with UFO-spotters after rumors began spreading that a mass suicide was planned there. In Texas, video game mogul Richard Garriott de Cayeux decided to throw his most elaborate party ever at midnight – just in case the Earth did come to an end. Maya experts, scientists and even U.S. space agency NASA insist the Maya did not predict the world's end and that there is nothing to worry about.

"Think of it like Y2K," said James Fitzsimmons, a Maya expert at Middlebury College in Vermont. "It's the end of one cycle and the beginning of another cycle."

A NEW DAWN?

New Age optimism, stream-of-consciousness evocations of wonder and awe, and starry-eyed dreams of extra-terrestrial contact have descended on the ancient sites this week – leaving the modern Maya bemused. "It's pure Hollywood," said Luis Mis Rodriguez, 45, a Maya selling obsidian figurines and souvenirs shaped into knives like ones the Maya once used for human sacrifice. In Chichen Itza, below a labyrinth of gray and white Maya pillars, a circle of some 40 tourists sat meditating silently on Thursday.

At one point, a woman in a pink shirt said "the golden age is truly golden" and asked the group to find a form of light to take them to another dimension. The meditation then resumed. Moments earlier, indigenous dancers wearing white linen, bright feathers and beads shook maracas and the seed pod of the flame tree to the beat of drums at the foot of the Temple of serpent god Kukulkan, a focal point of Friday's celebrations. "We ask all the brothers of the Earth that Kukulkan dominates the hearts of the entire world," said one of the dancers, raising his arms towards the sky.

The Maya civilization reached its peak between A.D. 250 and 900 when it ruled over large swathes of what is now southern Mexico, Guatemala, Belize and Honduras. The Maya developed hieroglyphic writing, an advanced astronomical system and a sophisticated calendar.

DOOMSDAY PREDICTIONS

There is a long tradition of calling time on the world. Basing his calculations on prophetic readings of the Bible, the great scientist Isaac Newton once cited 2060 as a year when the planet would be destroyed.

U.S. preacher William Miller predicted that Jesus Christ would descend to Earth in October 1844 to purge mankind of its sins. When it didn't happen, his followers, known as the Millerites, refereed to the event as The Great Disappointment.

In 1997, 39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, believing the world was about to be "recycled," committed suicide in San Diego to board an alien craft they said was trailing behind a comet. More recently, American radio host Harold Camping predicted the world would end on May 21, 2011, later moving the date forward five months when the apocalypse failed to materialize.

Such thoughts were far from the minds on Friday of gaudily attired pilgrims to Chichen Itza seeking spiritual release.